Apologies to those who expect to find real substance news on this site. But this story is too absurd too ignore

Penis theft panic hits city..

By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Original article posted here.

The price of our action: How many of the world's most dangerous places has the US had a role in destabilizing? (Answer: All, but one)

Travel Picks: The world's top 10 dangerous destinations

NEW YORK, Jan 25 (Reuters Life!) - People are opting for more unforgettable holidays but some countries can be risky even for the most adventurous travelers.

Forbes.com has compiled a list of the most dangerous destinations. The list is not endorsed by Reuters.

1. Somalia

This Horn of Africa country has been in the grip of warlords for the last decade, fighting for control of drug and weapon trafficking rights. Risks include military clashes, kidnapping, landmines and pirates.

2. Iraq

Military action, collateral damage, insurgency and suicide bombings are daily occurrences in the country. Security experts say unstable areas include Baghdad and stretch from Tikrit in the north to Hillah in the south and from Mandali in the east to Ramadi in the west.

3. Afghanistan

Even though the ruling Taliban regime was officially ousted in Afghanistan in 2001, attacks from those still loyal to it and to al Qaeda continue. Military personnel and civilians are killed by improvised explosive devices daily.

4. Haiti

Sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with top vacation destination Dominican Republic, Haiti, the western hemisphere's poorest country, is plagued by civil unrest, police corruption and readily available firearms.

5. Pakistan

The country, which borders Afghanistan, suffers from ongoing geopolitical turmoil. Bomb attacks and rioting between Shia and Sunni Muslim communities are a threat. In December 2007, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated during a suicide bombing after months of strife over delayed elections.

6. Sudan

Despite a peace agreement in 2005, areas of extreme danger due to battles between government troops and militias and local insurgent groups dot the country. Areas to avoid completely include the western region of Darfur, Ethiopian and Eritrean border regions and all of southern Sudan.

7. Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

A civil war that formally ended in 2003 still affects the country. As Rwandan and Ugandan troops pulled out of DRC towards the end of the war, rival militias have been fighting each other to fill the power vacuum this created. Crime is rampant in major cities and security conditions can fluctuate drastically even within minor distances.

8. Lebanon

Culminating in the 2005 assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, Lebanon is split by pro- and anti-Syrian forces vying for control of the government. Other risks include military battles in the south with neighboring Israel and civil unrest.

9. Zimbabwe

Anti-western sentiment prominently expressed by officials, out-of-control inflation and oppression employed by the government to silence dissenting voices are common in Zimbabwe.

10. Palestinian Territories

The region is caught in a brutal tug-of-war between pro-Fatah and pro-Hamas factions. Political and military battles with Israel, especially in the Gaza Strip, have made the security situation in this territory very unstable. Poverty and chronic violence add to the instability.

Original article posted here.

Our History of Crushing Democracy and Installing Dictators: The Case of Zaire/Congo

Underreported Stories

World’s 10 Stories You Don’t (MayBe) Know,Because It’s Underreported

After months of fighting, Islamist militants in June defeated the warlords in capital city Mogadishu and now control most of southern Somalia. The country, which has not had a functioning central government since 1991, has become “the largest potential safe haven for al Qaeda in Africa,” according to the International Crisis Group. This fall a U.N. report detailed how Iran and other countries were smuggling arms to the Islamists and how some 700 Somali fighters were sent to Lebanon to fight alongside Hizballah. Amid all the bloodshed, humanitarian workers are struggling to deliver aid to Somalis, who, after enduring a severe drought, are now dealing with massive flooding.

No.2 TUBERCULOSIS GETS EVEN SCARIER

Worldwide, tuberculosis — a bacterial lung disease spread mainly by coughing — kills one person every 18 seconds. And because HIV activates latent TB infection, tuberculosis has become the leading cause of AIDS-related deaths in the developing world. The TB vaccine is not very effective; diagnostic tests fail to identify at least 50% of cases, and patients often fail to complete the six-month treatment regimen, which contributes to new drug-resistant strains. Of the 9 million or so new TB cases each year, about 425,000 of them are resistant to standard medicines. One severely resistant strain that emerged in southern Africa this year is virtually impossible to treat.

No.3 INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY REFORMS

Whatever happened to the post-9/11 push to reform U.S. intelligence gathering and make sure the myriad agencies are all playing nice with each other? Not surprisingly, there has been little information about what’s going on with the spooks. Details from classified documents revealed that the intelligence budget has more than doubled in the past eight years and that the CIA is teaching FBI agents some of its tradecraft. But five years after the World Trade Center attacks, there was also word of new initiatives being launched to eliminate overlap and bring order to the chaotic fight against terrorism. So… uhh… how’s that going?

No.4 CONGO’S STILL-RAVAGED STATE

Although the Democratic Republic of Congo received some attention this year for holding its first free elections in four decades, the war-torn country — where nearly four million people have died as a result of the conflict since 1998 — is still home to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Congo is plagued by malnutrition, malaria and other largely preventable conditions that kill 1,200 people a day — a death toll, as UNICEF points out, that is the equivalent of suffering a 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami every six months. More children die in Congo before reaching their fifth birthday than in China, a country with 23 times the population.

No.5 CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN IRAQ

Not credible. That’s how President Bush described a peer-reviewed study this fall that calculated some 600,000 Iraqis had died from war-related violence since March 2003. The Johns Hopkins study, based on a survey of 1,849 Iraqi households, was dismissed by the White House for its small sample size. But in December, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) lambasted the Pentagon for “significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq.” For example, official accounts tallied 93 attacks one day in July, yet, according to the ISG, “a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.” Maybe those Johns Hopkins academics weren’t so far off after all.

No.6 THE $10 BILLION EFFORT TO REBUILD AFGHANISTAN

Things are bad in Iraq, but how goes it in Afghanistan? A joint report by the Defense Department and the State Department found that the U.S.-trained police force in Afghanistan is not capable of carrying out routine law enforcement work. Managers of the $1.1 billion training program, the report concluded, can’t keep track of how many officers are on duty, let alone what happened to all the equipment that has gone missing. Another report on contractors, by a California-based watchdog group, detailed such grim outcomes as new schools so shoddy they had to be rebuilt after a winter’s worth of snow and a highway that started crumbling before it was finished.

No.7 RECORD NUMBER OF AMERICANS JAILED

The Justice Department reported in November that a record 7 million people — or one in every 32 adults in the U.S. — were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Some 2.2 million Americans were in prison or jail on Dec. 31. 2005, but there was little coverage of this population’s 2.7% rise from the previous year or of its eight-fold increase since 1975. Nor was there much discussion of overcrowding (the federal prison system is operating at 34% over capacity) or of the cost associated with keeping so many people behind bars (it costs more than $20,000 per year for every person incarcerated).

No.8 MORE U.S. TROOPS WILLING TO REENLIST

While there was much talk about the Army raising the maximum age for new recruits from 35 to 42, the lesser-known development is that the Pentagon managed not only to meet, but to exceed its 2006 reenlistment goals for every branch of the military. Most significantly, the Army met its retention goal of 64,200 in August, with two months to spare before the end of the fiscal year. Another surprising sign of the times: by mid-October, the Marine Corps had received 3,870 re-enlistment applications and thus was on its way to meeting 63% of its annual retention goal less than two weeks into the new fiscal year.

No.9 A SPRAWLING INSURGENCY IN INDIA

Fueled by rampant poverty in rural areas, a 10,000-strong Maoist army threatens to take the shine off of India’s economic boom. The rebels are known as Naxalites after the eastern town of Naxalbari, where the violent peasant uprising began in 1967. Their attacks in impoverished but mineral-rich regions — on everything from mines and factories to trains and jails — led to at least 625 deaths in the first nine months of 2006, according to the Asian Centre for Human Rights. In August, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ranked the growing Maoist rebellion alongside terrorism as the greatest threats facing the country’s stability.

No.10 MIDDLE-CLASS NEIGHBORHOODS ARE SHRINKING IN THE U.S.

The percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in the 100 largest metropolitan areas across the country dropped from 58% in 1970 to 41% in 2000, according to the Brookings Institution. The study, which defined moderate-income families as those with incomes between 80% and 120% of the local median, found that these neighborhoods are disappearing faster than the proportion of metropolitan families earning middle incomes, which in three decades has fallen from 28% to 22%. The trend suggests that people are moving out of economically diverse neighborhoods, and the resulting disparities between high- and low-income neighborhoods make it harder for lower-income homeowners to move up the residential ladder.

Original article posted here.

Another otherwise ignored genocide (but they're Africans, so who cares?)

Villagers flee killings as 'peace' plan backfires

NYONGERA, Congo (Reuters) -- "I buried my child in the forest," said Jeannette Nyirarukundo, who fled her village in eastern Congo when it was attacked by the government army meant to protect it.

Six-year-old Moise starved to death before the family reached the safety of a camp at Nyongera, 70 kilometers (44 miles) from North Kivu's provincial capital Goma.

Some 113,000 civilians have fled fighting in Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu since February, and the province now has 600,000 displaced people, according to the U.N. humanitarian coordination agency OCHA.
'They came for us there, too'

"We slept in the forest for two weeks, and then they came after us there too. It wasn't safe anymore, and we came here," said Nyirarukundo, 28, who was accompanied by her husband and three surviving children.

Eastern Congo is no stranger to violence, but ironically the latest surge in killing started with a deal designed to bring peace to this corner of the vast country nearly four years after a nationwide accord officially ended a 1998-2003 war.

Laurent Nkunda, a dissident Congolese army general, led his two brigades into the bush in 2004, vowing to protect his fellow ethnic Tutsis. He is under an international arrest warrant for alleged war crimes after his men occupied Bukavu, South Kivu.

After last year's historic polls saw President Joseph Kabila become Congo's first democratically elected leader in more than four decades, the army and Rwandan mediators began negotiations to bring Nkunda and his soldiers into existing army brigades stationed in North Kivu. That process began in January.

But instead of ending the violence, the five new mixed brigades began hunting down Nkunda's enemies in the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu-dominated Rwandan rebel movement based in eastern Congo.
Mixed brigades kill, rape, force civilians from homes

"There's more and more movement every day ... If this military strategy continues, we could be looking at another 280,000 more (displaced)," said Luciano Calestini, emergency specialist for eastern Congo for U.N. Children's Fund UNICEF.

"The next six months is going to be a disaster. It's going to be catastrophic," he said.

Human rights observers accuse the mixed brigades of killing, raping and forcing civilians from their homes.

Soldiers from the mixed Bravo Brigade arbitrarily executed at least 15 mostly Hutu civilians in Buramba village about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Goma, the human rights division of Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission said in a report.

Bravo Brigade commander Colonel Sultani Makenga blamed the massacre on the FDLR.

"What we did was separate the population from the FDLR. That's why the villages are uninhabited," Makenga told Reuters in an interview. "We evacuated the civilians in order to fight the FDLR alone ... It was to protect them."
'We are in the hands of a killer'

Makenga said operations would continue until the FDLR were chased out of Congo or destroyed.

Dominique Bofondo, territorial administrator of Rutshuru, where Bravo Brigade is based, said civilians now lived in fear of the mixed brigades.

"These are the same soldiers who killed people, who raped women. And now they are here to take care of us? ... We are in the hands of a killer," Bofondo said.

In Nyongera camp, Nyirarukundo said she is still afraid to return home but says her surviving children are hungry and sick.

"For now, we have nothing. There's no food. Nothing. We just want security, so we can go home," she said.

Original article posted here.